WikiLeaks Spills Its Biggest Ever Stash of Secret US Records

Jamie Condliffe

WikiLeaks has just released its biggest ever stash of formerly confidential information. Referred to as the "Kissinger Cables", they include 1.7 million diplomatic records from between 1973 and 1976.
The name, unsurprisingly, stems from the fact that over 200,000 of the records are associated with ex-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. WikiLeaks explains what's in there:

The Kissinger Cables comprise more than 1.7 million US diplomatic records for the period 1973 to 1976, including 205,901 records relating to former US Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. Dating from January 1, 1973 to December 31, 1976 they cover a variety of diplomatic traffic including cables, intelligence reports and congressional correspondence. They include more than 1.3 million full diplomatic cables and 320,000 originally classified records. These include more than 227,000 cables classified as "CONFIDENTIAL" and 61,000 cables classified as "SECRET". Perhaps more importantly, there are more than 12,000 documents with the sensitive handling restriction "NODIS" or 'no distribution', and more than 9,000 labelled "Eyes Only".

WikiLeaks goes on to explain that the cables reveal "significant revelations about US involvements with fascist dictatorships, particularly in Latin America, under Franco's Spain (including about the Spanish royal family) and in Greece under the regime of the Colonels." It also claims that, while the files should have been declassified after 25 years, the government has attempted to reclassify them time and again. No need to now!
In total, the documents provide 700 million words to sift through, and in raw PDF form total 380GB, making them the biggest WikiLeaks publication yet. Expect to see newspapers reporting from them in three, two, one... [WikiLeaks via Verge]
Base image by Gothopotam under Creative Commons license